Ep.1 Brand Noise: The rise of generic branding

Pim van Helten

Yes, you found us. A new podcast about brands. Welcome to Brand Focus, a podcast about brands that want to grow in a time when growth is no longer a given.

Together with my guest, I explore why it has become so difficult for brands to grow, and what changes are needed to help a brand become the best version of itself.

And today, I’m doing that with my guest Michael Vromans. Welcome.

The first episode of a new podcast about brands. Do you think there’s a need for that?

 

Michael Vromans

Yes, I definitely think so.

First, because, as you said, growth is no longer a given. Brands have to compete with other brands across so many different channels. And there are simply a lot of brands that aren’t getting the best out of themselves.

So yes, I definitely think it’s important to explore that.

And second, it’s my profession. I think it’s a wonderful field to work in, so that makes it all the more enjoyable.

 

Pim van Helten

Yes, exactly.

 

Michael Vromans

How about you?

 

Pim van Helten

I definitely think there’s a need for it.

There are already a lot of podcasts about brands, and I think you listen to quite a few of them yourself. What I always notice is that those podcasts tend to focus on success stories. And we marketers are good at that, sharing our wins.

But podcasts about brands that are struggling with positioning, with consistency, with the sheer number of channels they need to manage, with how to apply AI, and ultimately how to build a well connected brand, those are much harder to find.

And because so many success stories are being shared, marketers are also digging their own graves in a way. Because if you look at what’s happening in the boardroom, the role of the CMO is under enormous pressure.

I’ve even read that some people believe the CMO role should be abolished altogether. And because so many success stories are shared while the real challenges remain largely undiscussed, it doesn’t get any easier for CMOs to clearly demonstrate their value in the boardroom.

So yes, I definitely think a podcast can play a meaningful role in changing that.

Hopefully, we can create a small ripple in the water that leads to some meaningful change.

At DPDK, we believe in connected brands. We’ll go deeper into what we mean by that in the coming episodes, and why it matters. But today, we’re discussing the idea that more and more companies, and therefore more and more brands, have started to look alike.

More and more branding has become generic. That’s quite a statement. So let’s explore how that happened.

But first, what does generic branding mean to you? Can you explain that?

 

Michael Vromans

To me, generic branding means you can remove or replace certain elements, put a different logo on it, and nothing really changes.

You see this a lot with brands that position themselves purely around their product offering. They don’t have their own story, or they haven’t yet discovered and articulated one.

And they don’t carry that story through consistently across all channels, both digital and physical, or visually either.

They don’t put out their own distinct look or their own distinct voice. As a result, they simply look too much like their direct competitors. You see this all the time.

 

Pim van Helten

Literally.

 

Michael Vromans

Literally, yes. Absolutely.

 

Pim van Helten

Why is that a problem?

 

Michael Vromans

Because your target audience won’t notice you.

If you have the same positioning and you even look alike visually, because that happens to be the trend, or you’re saying the same things because it’s Black Friday or Valentine’s Day and you have another promotion running, then you’re not standing out in any meaningful way.

So you end up having to push harder and spend more.

And often you can’t, because the budgets aren’t there. At the same time, marketing teams and CMOs are expected to do more with less.

Eventually, that leads to a real problem.

 

Pim van Helten

So hollow positioning and no distinct identity.

Is that also why brands keep shouting louder? Creating more and more noise?

 

Michael Vromans

Yes, that’s what you see.

You start following the rhythm of the day and the rhythm of the calendar, where are we in the year, and what do we need to say because everyone else is saying it too?

But the real question is, do you actually need to say that?

Have you found your own brand story? Have you sharpened your positioning?

Because if you have, you can really stand behind it. And maybe even flip it around, so people come to you specifically for that.

 

Pim van Helten

The other week, I was out leafleting.

My wife started a small clay studio, truly from scratch, and she wanted to try leafleting to build brand awareness. So you’re basically starting a brand from zero.

In the end, it’s always about visibility. You have a message you want to get across, you want people to remember your brand, but you also need to be seen.

So we went leafleting. And what struck me was that everyone seems to have a no junk mail sticker on their door these days. It’s remarkable.

We’re both millennials. Back in the nineties, that was different.

 

Michael Vromans

I had a paper route back in the day too.

 

Pim van Helten

How many people had those stickers back then?

 

Michael Vromans

Back then, it was really rare. My gut says maybe one in ten, or even fewer.

We actually have one at home now too.

 

Pim van Helten

I think people are just fed up with all the noise.

Fed up with brands screaming for attention and throwing around hollow discounts. Or saying, come check this out, with no real meaning behind it.

You see brands making more and more noise, while consumers become more and more deaf to it.

That’s an interesting development. Change is needed if you want to be remembered at all.

For me, branding is about making sure you’re remembered, that you’re in the consideration set when someone is about to make a choice.

Is that how you see it too? There are a lot of definitions of branding and marketing.

 

Michael Vromans

Absolutely.

I’d describe it a bit more from the heart myself. But in practice, it’s exactly what you’re saying, scientifically speaking, you want to be in that consideration set.

Someone leans toward your brand when they think, now I have a need for this, or I’m open to being persuaded. Or you’ve simply built a preference.

So yes, you’re remembered somewhere.

And we’re seeing more and more brands starting to look alike. How did that happen?

Has it always been this way, or is this a new phenomenon?

 

Pim van Helten

If you look at how a brand was built twenty five years ago, or how you would execute a course correction back then, you’d put out a press release.

You’d update your corporate identity, your logo, maybe some brand identity elements.

Then you might produce a new commercial, print some flyers, posters, and billboards.

Broadly speaking, that was your rebrand.

With the rise of the internet, an enormous number of new channels came along that brands now have to deal with.

That makes the impact of a rebrand massive.

Even before you roll it out, you’re already juggling far more considerations than you would have twenty five years ago.

Our agency came to life around the turn of the millennium. We started as a Flash agency, Adobe Flash, flashy websites.

That was the era of 2000 to 2005, when many companies were taking their first steps onto the internet.

Building a website was technically more complex back then. There was less tooling, more pioneering. But that was the first step.

Then came email marketing, and around 2008, the iPhone with the App Store. Then social media took off.

With Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and everything around them came a kind of always on expectation, you need to be everywhere.

You need to keep your website up to date, maintain your app, send emails, manage social channels, handle SEO, accessibility, and the list goes on.

It has become far more complex for a marketer to execute a rebrand, let alone keep all channels up to date.

That means that, as a marketer, you spend less time on the substantive direction, where you actually want to take your brand, and more time in that always on mindset, I need to post now, Black Friday is tomorrow, I need to be visible this week because my competitors are visible.

There’s calendar driven pressure. Teams need to keep producing.

And I think that’s a significant part of why brands have started to look more and more alike.

Sometimes marketers quietly accept that teams post things that aren’t fully aligned with the brand.

 

Michael Vromans

Right. And that raises the question, all those things from before still need to be done and maintained.

Has more time been added, or does it all need to happen in the same amount of time?

 

Pim van Helten

There’s a greater drive for volume and speed. Those tend to take priority over brand building.

Brand building is long term. It doesn’t happen overnight, and not in a single quarter either.

A course correction requires a long runway, you build from nothing to something by consistently and with discipline filling all your channels with your new message.

That’s an enormous challenge.

And when you look at how many templates and formats teams need to serve all those channels, you quickly realize, this is complex.

 

Michael Vromans

Absolutely.

And it’s actually a double problem, you also lose consistency.

Noise builds up between messages because each channel has its own mechanics and dictates how your story needs to be told.

As a result, your brand story gets diluted.

And when the same team has to produce far more in the same amount of time, the pace picks up.

More output is expected than is actually achievable. Then creativity starts to flatten out.

As a team, you need to know what the narrative is, what the brand stands for, and how you protect that line across all expressions.

How do you measure quality? What do you benchmark against?

Too often, the only criterion is, Does it look good on the site?

 

Pim van Helten

So the focus shifts from brand building to content production.

Brands need to be always on. They almost need to play an editorial role, constantly feeding all channels and algorithms.

 

Michael Vromans

Yes, exactly.

 

Pim van Helten

We’ve been talking about brands that increasingly look alike.

Do you have an example? Let me give you a kind of quiz.

I’m thinking of a major ecommerce platform in the Netherlands, fast delivery, great service, a massive product range. Primary color, blue.

 

Michael Vromans

The first thing that comes to mind is bol.com.

 

Pim van Helten

No, that’s not it.

 

Michael Vromans

Okay. Is it a platform with literally everything?

 

Pim van Helten

Yes, an enormous range from A to Z.

 

Michael Vromans

Then I’d also think of bol, Zalando, and many more. There are a lot that look alike.

And order today, delivered tomorrow, Coolblue too.

 

Pim van Helten

It’s Amazon.

And when you think about those brands, you see the similarities.

The USPs are often identical, fast service, broad assortment, next day delivery, a great customer experience, and smooth checkout flows.

A few years ago, these were the darlings, disruptors, even in terms of brand development. Lots of marketers looked up to them.

But if you look at them now from a positioning standpoint, they’re strikingly similar.

So where else do you recognize generic branding? Not just in positioning, but also in identity, how a brand looks, talks, and feels.

 

Michael Vromans

It’s in tone of voice, how a brand communicates, and whether there’s anything distinctive about it.

Often, there isn’t.

Copy is increasingly being generated. And you start to see the same types of text, the same tone of voice, the same propositions built around USPs instead of something that truly comes from the brand’s core.

And it’s in brand identity and design systems.

Design trends move globally at lightning speed. What’s a trend today goes global immediately.

With newer brands, you can sometimes almost tell which year they were founded in, because they perfectly reflect the design trend of that year.

Pantone, for example, announces a color of the year at the start of each year. And there are trend reports everywhere, design trends, marketing trends. You’re expected to keep up with all of it.

But with new brands or rebrands, you often see that it was done fast and pushed out quickly.

You get last year’s typeface paired with last year’s color. Done.

And if you look at websites, you can often roughly guess how old they are.

A hero section with a single headline, three bullet points underneath, some client logos, and then the rest of the page.

 

Pim van Helten

That also happens because the world is so connected. Trends ripple everywhere.

But isn’t the underlying issue that marketers play it safe? That they want to meet a norm rather than color outside the lines?

 

Michael Vromans

I think it’s definitely possible to be unique and creative.

But it comes down to making choices.

Do you dare to take a stance? Do you dare to stand for something? And do you dare to carry that through consistently in words, visuals, and across every touchpoint?

You don’t have to be extreme or be an agitator brand.

But do you have the courage to say what you stand for, and also what you don’t stand for?

That fear of making a clear choice is something you see a lot.

The brands that do make that choice stand out positively.

 

Pim van Helten

Take Philips.

What exactly does Philips stand for today? Electronics? Healthcare? Are they still in lighting?

Those hard choices seem difficult for them to make.

Or take de Bijenkorf, a beautiful brand, but the digital experience doesn’t feel nearly as premium as the in store experience.

 

Michael Vromans

No. The premium feel comes mostly from the brand roster.

As a platform, the shop itself barely differentiates. In fact, I sometimes find that a household name like bol.com outperforms it.

 

Pim van Helten

How does fragmentation factor into this?

Internal teams, agencies, executives, everyone has a different view of the brand.

What does that do to consistency?

 

Michael Vromans

You end up with a playing field where different forces are pulling in different directions.

Because clarity is missing.

If you’re not connected from front to back, positioning, offering, story, tone of voice, target audience, intent, then you’re leaving the door open for fragmentation.

And when you bring in outside experts on top of that, one says, We need to go this way, and another says, No, that way.

That’s when things splinter.

You see it, for example, when a corporate website feels completely different from a My Account section or an ecommerce platform.

Different teams, different developers. Sometimes even the language is literally different.

And your audience doesn’t care about any of that.

All they see is the experience.

Too often, organizations look from the inside out, how do we make this work internally?

Instead of from the outside in, how does this journey feel without any friction?

 

Pim van Helten

Fragmentation also happens because there’s no system in place to guide brand building.

The real question is, who owns the brand? Who sets the direction?

I once interned at O’Neill in Warmond. There, I noticed that the marketing team wanted to go in a different direction than the design team.

That battle, who is the brand, is something you see in a lot of organizations.

IT has a say. Fulfillment has a say. Other departments are responsible for delivering on the brand promise.

So who actually owns the brand? And how do you carry a direction through consistently?

There’s also no standard methodology that marketers learn for building a brand.

Many programs are either very strategic or very practical. But a solid system for managing brand fragmentation is often missing.

As a result, many brands are driven by short term thinking, revenue needs to come in now. Black Friday is coming. Things need to move.

While brand building is long term.

It requires something fundamentally different from deliver it tomorrow.

And that’s where the tension lies, managing channels and staying visible versus building creativity and innovation.

But this is starting to sound like a dark cloud.

There are also brands that do make an impression.

What are some examples, for you, of brands that are doing it right?

 

Michael Vromans

A great example is Upfront.

It’s a fairly local brand, with roots in Rotterdam. It started as a sports nutrition brand.

Upfront means honest, and that’s exactly what they stand for.

I came across them through sports and running. They clearly stand for something and openly share their vision.

You see that reflected in the product packaging, visuals, online experience, and their store.

Very consistent.

They stand for food that’s as clean and honest as possible.

They started with sports nutrition, but they’re expanding.

They recently opened a supermarket, and they carry the same philosophy there, one type of tomato, one type of potato, unprocessed products. Clear choices.

Their packaging is also minimalist.

In the food industry, you typically see a lot of color and visual noise. They stand out through restraint and clarity.

And you see that same line everywhere, in the product, the packaging, and the website.

That’s powerful.

 

Pim van Helten

What I notice about brands that do it well is that they put their values at the center of their branding.

I have a global electronics brand in mind with values like ease, calm, and control.

 

Michael Vromans

Apple?

 

Pim van Helten

Yes.

Those three values show up everywhere, control is embedded in their ecosystem and privacy approach, ease in their interfaces and usability, and calm in the minimalist design.

And they carry that through consistently.

 

Michael Vromans

And you can move seamlessly between processes. Both physically and digitally.

 

Pim van Helten

A lot of brands are envious of their products, but I find their brand building just as impressive.

Every touchpoint expresses those core values.

If it doesn’t, that touchpoint doesn’t exist in that form.

Another example is Patagonia.

They say very clearly, We’re not in the business of fashion. We’re in the business of saving the planet.

 

Michael Vromans

Patagonia, yes.

 

Pim van Helten

They lead with values and carry them through to the smallest details, labels, statements, repair and return policies.

Because of that, it feels more like a movement you join.

You could say, they make clothes too. But you choose Patagonia because it aligns with your values.

 

Michael Vromans

Those are brands that make clear choices, which allows people to connect with them.

 

Pim van Helten

You can buy products anywhere without compromise.

But you also want to be able to identify with a brand.

And with Upfront, there’s probably more to it than just healthy. There’s also convenience, performance, and a clear vision.

 

Michael Vromans

Exactly.

They say, everything you need to perform, and nothing more.

That resonates with a specific group of people.

People sometimes even pay more because they feel at home with it. And they keep coming back.

And they also say, we’re not necessarily in the business of sports nutrition, but of food.

We start with sports nutrition and then go broader.

You see the same pattern with Patagonia, from outdoor to broader, while the values stay consistent.

 

Pim van Helten

That does come with a risk, a brand can erode under the weight of its own success if it’s not careful.

But the point is, there are brands that make clear choices and carry them through consistently across their entire brand ecosystem.

How can we summarize this?

Our thesis is, brands are increasingly starting to look alike.

Do you feel we’re at a crossroads, that change is coming?

 

Michael Vromans

There is an opportunity to choose differently.

And there is also a necessity to choose differently.

It can be done differently, but it starts with structure and clarity.

One thing I keep wondering is this, with successful brands, does that choice now need to sit higher up in the organization than ever before?

If a department makes a choice, is that often not enough anymore?

How high up does that ownership need to be?

 

Pim van Helten

It sits at the executive level.

The direction of a company is set by its leadership. And leadership is responsible for ensuring the organization behaves in the ways needed to achieve results.

I think boardrooms too often engage in problem avoidance behavior.

Rather than facing the real challenges head on, they manage the status quo.

Then you get, we’re still a bit of this and a bit of that, but we’re still making money, so let’s keep going as we are.

But real ambition requires honest reflection on what’s holding you back, what you truly want to achieve, and whether you’re willing to make the hard choices.

Then you can set a strong direction.

And after that, you need to carry that direction through consistently in everything you do.

That means making choices every single day, what do we do, and what don’t we do?

Strategy is maybe 20 percent. Execution is 80 percent.

A lot more people are responsible for that than just the executive team.

But that direction needs to be clearly defined first.

And when you execute that consistently, that’s where a brand’s success is built.

That’s also something worth exploring further in a future episode.

 

Michael Vromans

I’m already looking forward to it.

 

Pim van Helten

Thank you, Michael, for this great first episode and conversation.